I was watching the local PBS TV station last night and they had on this Ed Sullivan 60's music retrospective. Do you remember the Sixties? As Nancy my third wife used to say, if you do remember the Sixties, you weren't really there. I was there. I graduated from Garfield Heights High School which is a suburb of Cleveland in June of 1960 and one month later, I was on a Pennsylvania RR train to Philadelphia. It was like being shot out of a canon. Cleveland was, and is, a fairly big city. But Philly was the big time. Maybe not the Big Apple, but maybe the big kumquat. It had a subway train running right down Broad Street to the Naval Station where I was billeted awaiting my trip to Virginia Beach and Guided Missile School. I rode down to Virginia Beach with this black sailor from Chicago in a Greyhound bus. He and I talked about what our new lives were going to be like in the Navy. He was off to Naval Air Station Oceana which was real close to Dam Neck where my school was located.
Dam Neck was located on the northern edge of The Great Dismal Swamp. What a wonderfully descriptive name, The Great Dismal Swamp. Those old Southerners didn't believe in sugar coating things. I particularly liked the big poisonous Cottonmouth Water Moccasins that swam around the waterways on the base. The guns were also nice. Dam Neck was also home to the FADTC, the Fleet Air Defense Training Center. About a quarter of a mile from the school was the gunline on the beach. While we were trying to learn the basics of guided missilery, there were about 25 five inch naval guns banging away at some poor unsuspecting remote control drone. What a din that was. Just down the beach from Dam Neck was the town of Virginia Beach. It was wonderful. Lots of girls strutting around in their bikinis and other grand sights, but the day after Labor Day, the place turned into a ghost town. Everybody went home, wherever that was. I also experienced my first hurricane, Donna, while there. It was the worst in fifty years and it let me know that I wasn't in Cleveland anymore.
After seven months in Virginia Beach, life speedshifted to the next gear, California.
Heretofore, I had never been on an airplane and in one day I got a full indoctrination. A DC-3 propeller plane took us from Norfolk to Norfolk airport. After taking off and getting slammed around for a half hour we returned back to where we started. We then got into another Capitol Airlines plane, this time a turboprop Viscount that got us to National airport in DC. The next leg was on another prop plane a DC-7 which took us all of the way from DC to Baltimore. A fifteen minute flight. We now were big-time and boarded a United DC-8 jet.
A few brief hours later we landed in LA. It was February and it was cold when we boarded the plane in Baltimore. Back in the Stone Age of flight we had to walk outside across the, so called, tarmac and go up the boarding ladder. When we landed in LA, I bundled up. I had on my dress blue uniform with wool sweater underneath and over everything was my peacoat. I walked out the front door of the airplane and was hit in the face with 78 degree weather at ten PM, in February. I was from that minute on, a card carrying Californian. Off we went to learn about actual missiles, the Terrier/Tartars in my case.
But that's another part of my story, to be continued.
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